A fresh lick of paint for Pro-Bel Mar 02. 065
Another website I’ve been working on recently just went live. Pro-Bel produce control, signal distribution and innovative automation solutions for the broadcast market.
I rolled their new website using Expression Engine for Content Management. It’s a great off the shelf CMS with huge flexibility so I’m feeling like I made the right decision in selecting it way back in October. :)
Mark of the web (or why IE6 sucks) Mar 01. 062
I’ve been having a very interesting time during the past few days discovering what a total mess Microsoft has made of IE6 with the XP SP2 upgrade. Let me begin the story.
A few years back I wrote a simple HTML based Catalogue CD-ROM for a client. This provided users with an interface through which to navigate a large number of PDF documents. Recently they approached me to give this a bit of an update. The old version had a tree based navigation structure consisting of a number of interlinked HTML pages which displayed the contents of each branch.
Being as we now have modern web browsers that support XHTML and CSS I thought I’d bring things up to date, and simplify the maintenance process by incorporating the entire tree structure in a structured unordered list and then use some simple JavaScript to toggle the visibility of the branch elements. Sound slike a plan right? Yes.
Not long after getting something up and running I did some initial tests in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, all seemed good. I emailed a ZIP archive of the ‘work in progress’ over to the client for approval.
I hear back from the client that she’s getting a ‘Active Content’ warning in IE every time she trys to launch the HTML file.
To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has restricted this file from showing active content that could access your computer.
Hmm, ok. I open up IE, revert my setting to default just in case and test again. Lo and behold, I get the warning too.
So, what’s changed in IE6 following an upgrade to XP SP2? Well, to fill a number of security holes which might allow someone to execute code locally on your machine whilst browsing the web, Microsoft have opted to lock down and prevent any active content from running on your local machine at all (rather than fix the holes). Of course a user can ‘allow active content’ to be run on the local machine, but in most cases users will be freaked out by the dire warning which they have to manually over-ride.
Microsoft offer 3 solutions to this problem, but none of them are acceptable.
*1. Ask users to turn off local machine security*
Ok, I can’t really see any clients agreeing to that approach.
2. Add the ‘“Mark of the web”:http://www.phdcc.com/xpsp2.htm#markoftheweb’ to all your HTML pages
No good as links to other file types don’t work. I can’t add an HTML comment to a PDF document now can I.
*3. Wrap your application in an HTA file*
This is IE only, Users without IE set as the default browser are out of luck if they try to run my clients CD-ROM.
So, what can you do if you want to run an HTML based application off your local machine without having to resort to any of the above.
After a bit of digging I came across a fantastic little product called ‘“Server2Go”:http://www.server2go-web.de/’. This is a fully functional free Apache web server that you can drag and drop onto a CD-ROM. This allows you to run your HTML application ‘through’ a real web server which exists only while that browser session is open, so to all intents are purposes your users are browsing ‘online content’ and so IE is quite happy to execute JavaScript and other Active Content.
Problem Solved! :)
You know you need a coffee when… Jan 09. 063
You know you need a coffee when…
…you spend half an hour trying to work out why a simple change you’re making to a PHP class is having no effect on your code, bang your head repeatedly against the desk in bemusement and then finally spot the problem.
You’ve been reviewing the effects of your change at the wrong URL.
Slap! I’m putting 3 spoonfulls of sugar in this one, might wake me up a bit. And yes, I did stop giving up cofee.
Drafty Dec 23. 050
If like me you often have ideas for blog posts but never get round to actually writing them, you’ll have a bunch of ‘drafts’ in your CMS of choice.
Well, it’s time to clear out the drafts, but before I delete them all for good I though I might summarise some of the less pointless topics in a little blog ‘medley’.
Opera is kinda good; spawned by the realisation that this ain’t a half bad browser when I recently downloaded the latest copy sans banner ads, although I can’t see it drawing me away from Firefox, there are way too many great extensions for that spunky little thing.
Ditching Skype in favor of a fixed line; What I’m in the process of doing right now, to cut a long story short(ish)… I bought a Skype handset, bought a SkypeIn number and thought hey, technology is great, this will do my business proud. 3 months later I’m wishing I’d not been so ambitious, the line quality is very often below acceptable and on many occasions clients simply cannot get through and resort to calling the mobile. Goodbye Skype, Hello BT (Although there’s another whole story about why I went with BT over my local Cable provider).
Challenging
MamoriesMemories; I stumbled across some old websites I designed way back when I started out in the industry (1997). These sites were all based aroud ‘challenges’ and were mostly done as freebies by the agency I worked for at the time to help build a portfolio. I guess you could say these are the sites that I cut my teeth on (espeically considering I was using Frames, Tables and Frontpage – Oh how things have progressed!).
Drew beat me to the punch; writing up a nice article about Auto Selecting navigation for 24 ways. A trick he tought me at Mirashade and one which I like to refer to as The neatest CSS trick in the book.
Setting up my LAMP server – Part 1, well I wrote that some time back, I started writing Setting up my LAMP server, Part 2 but got bored. Sorry guys, maybe next year.
Well, this will probably be my last post now until the new year, I’m taking next week off to spend some quality time with the family before getting stuck into 2006. See you all on the other side. Have a good one. :)
Expression Engine goes free Dec 19. 053
Great news today for anyone who’s fancied giving the Expression Engine CMS a shot but has never been able to swallow the rather reasonable price tag. pMachine have just released a free ‘Core’ version which includes many of the great features included in the full commercial version.
I’ve been using Expression Engine for a couple of weeks now on a new project and I must say I’m very impressed. It has it’s nuances, but it’s a rock solid approach to Content Management which allows you to easily mould it’s form to your clients requirements. Oh and I almost forgot to mention that they released a new commercial version too, 1.4 features over 70 improvements and bug fixes.